I thought any prank was bound to fall flat here.

The Assembly Hall was used for large lectures, debates, plays, and concerts; it had the worst acoustics in the school. I couldn’t make out what Brinker was saying. He stood on the polished marble floor in front of us, but facing the platform, talking to the boys behind the balustrade. I heard him say the word “inquiry” to them, and something about “the country demands….”

“What is all this hot air?” I said into the blur.

“I don’t know,” Phineas answered shortly.

As he turned toward us Brinker was saying “… blame on the responsible party. We will begin with a brief prayer.” He paused, surveying us with the kind of wide-eyed surmise Mr. Carhart always used at this point, and then added in Mr. Carhart’s urbane murmur, “Let us pray.”

We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly into the awkward crouch in which God was addressed at Devon, leaning forward with elbows on knees. Brinker had caught us, and in a moment it was too late to escape, for he had moved swiftly into the Lord’s Prayer. If when Brinker had said “Let us pray” I had said “Go to hell” everything might have been saved.

At the end there was an indecisive, semiserious silence and then Brinker said, “Phineas, if you please.” Finny got up with a shrug and walked to the center of the floor, between us and the platform. Brinker got an armchair from behind the balustrade, and seated Finny on it with courtly politeness. “Now just in your own words,” he said.

“What own words?” said Phineas, grimacing up at him with his best you-are-an-idiot expression.

“I know you haven’t got many of your own,” said Brinker with a charitable smile. “Use some of Gene’s then.”

“What shall I talk about? You? I’ve got plenty of words of my own for that.”

“I’m all right,” Brinker glanced gravely around the room for confirmation, “you’re the casualty.”

“Brinker,” began Finny in a constricted voice I did not recognize, “are you off your head or what?”

“No,” said Brinker evenly, “that’s Leper, our other casualty. Tonight we’re investigating you.”

“What the hell are you talking about!” I cut in suddenly.

“Investigating Finny’s accident!” He spoke as though this was the most natural and self-evident and inevitable thing we could be doing.

I felt the blood flooding into my head. “After all,” Brinker continued, “there is a war on. Here’s one soldier our side has already lost. We’ve got to find out what happened.”

“Just for the record,” said someone from the platform. “You agree, don’t you, Gene?”

“I told Brinker this morning,” I began in a voice treacherously shaking, “that I thought this was the worst—”

“And I said,” Brinker’s voice was full of authority and perfectly under control, “that for Finny’s good,” and with an additional timbre of sincerity, “and for your own good too, by the way, Gene, that we should get all this out into the open. We don’t want any mysteries or any stray rumors and suspicions left, in the air at the end of the year, do we?”

A collective assent to this rumbled through the blurring atmosphere of the Assembly Room.

“What are you talking about!” Finny’s voice was full of contemptuous music. “What rumors and suspicions?”

“Never mind about that,” said Brinker with his face responsibly grave. He’s enjoying this, I thought bitterly, he’s imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He’s forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded. “Why don’t you just tell us in your words what happened?” Brinker continued. “Just humor us, if you want to think of it that way. We aren’t trying to make you feel bad. Just tell us. You know we wouldn’t ask you if we didn’t have a good reason … good reasons.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Nothing to tell?” Brinker looked pointedly at the small cast around Finny’s lower leg and the cane he held between his knees.

“Well then, I fell out of a tree.”

“Why?” said someone on the platform. The acoustics were so bad and the light so dim that I could rarely tell who was speaking, except for Finny and Brinker who were isolated on the wide strip of marble floor between us in the seats and the others on the platform.

“Why?” repeated Phineas. “Because I took a wrong step.”

“Did you lose your balance?” continued the voice.

“Yes,” echoed Finny grimly, “I lost my balance.”

“You had better balance than anyone in the school.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t say it for a compliment.”

“Well then, no thanks.”

“Have you ever thought that you didn’t just fall out of that tree?”

This touched an interesting point Phineas had been turning over in his mind for a long time. I could tell that because the obstinate, competitive look left his face as his mind became engaged for the first time. “It’s very funny,” he said, “but ever since then I’ve had a feeling that the tree did it by itself. It’s an impression I’ve had. Almost as though the tree shook me out by itself.”

The acoustics in the Assembly Room were so poor that silences there had a heavy hum of their own.

“Someone else was in the tree, isn’t that so?”

“No,” said Finny spontaneously, “I don’t think so.” He looked at the ceiling. “Or was there? Maybe there was somebody climbing up the rungs of the trunk. I kind of forget.”

This time the hum of silence was prolonged to a point where I would be forced to fill it with some kind of sound if it didn’t end. Then someone else on the platform spoke up. “I thought somebody told me that Gene Forrester was—”

“Finny was there,” Brinker interrupted commandingly, “he knows better than anyone.”

“You were there too, weren’t you, Gene?” this new voice from the platform continued.

“Yes,” I said with interest, “yes, I was there too.”

“Were you—near the tree?”

Finny turned toward me. “You were down at the bottom, weren’t you?” he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend’s voice.

I had been studying very carefully the way my hands wrinkled when tightly clenched, but I was able to bring my head up and return his inquiring look. “Down at the bottom, yes.”

Finny went on. “Did you see the tree shake or anything?” He flushed faintly at what seemed to him the absurdity of his own question. “I’ve always meant to ask you, just for the hell of it.”

I took this under consideration. “I don’t recall anything like that …”

“Nutty question,” he muttered.

“I thought you were in the tree,” the platform voice cut in.

“Well of course,” Finny said with an exasperated chuckle, “of course I was in the tree—oh you mean Gene?—he wasn’t in—is that what you mean, or—” Finny floundered with muddled honesty between me and my questioner.

“I meant Gene,” the voice said.

“Of course Finny was in the tree,” I said. But I couldn’t make the confusion last, “and I was down at the bottom, or climbing the rungs I think …”

“How do you expect him to remember?” said Finny sharply. “There was a hell of a lot of confusion right then.”

“A kid I used to play with was hit by a car once when I was about eleven years old,” said Brinker seriously, “and I remember every single thing about it, exactly where I was standing, the color of the sky, the noise the brakes of the car made—I never will forget anything about it.”

“You and I are two different people,” I said.

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” Brinker responded in an odd tone.

“Well of course no one’s accusing me—”

“Don’t argue so much,” his voice tried for a hard compromise, full of warning and yet striving to pass unnoticed by the others.

“No, we’re not accusing you,” a boy on the platform said evenly, and then I stood accused.

“I think I remember now!” Finny broke in, his eyes bright and relieved. “Yes, I remember seeing you standing on the bank. You were looking up and your hair was plastered down over your forehead so that you had that dumb look you always have when you’ve been in the water—what was it you said? ‘Stop posing up there’ or one of those best-pal cracks you’re always making.” He was very happy. “And I think I did start to pose just to make you madder, and I said, what did I say? something about the two of us … yes, I said “Let’s make a double jump,’ because I thought if we went together it would be something that had never been done before, holding hands in a jump—” Then it was as though someone suddenly slapped him. “No, that was on the ground when I said that to you. I said that to you on the ground, and then the two of us started to climb …” he broke off.